Mt. 5:13-16 Dear Friends, Here is an amazing statistic about the religious scene in the US. Roman Catholics are the largest religious group. The second largest religious assortment are those who have left the Roman Catholic Church. Equally surprising is this. In many Latin America countries, traditionally Roman Catholic, Evangelicals are the largest religious denomination.Somewhere along the line, a great number of us, in all of these religious groups, failed to get the memo from Jesus that we need to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world.When one delves into the rea...

Matthew 5:1-12 Dear Friends, On this Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time, we have the first gospel selectin of the next five Sundays. This is our invitation into the Sermon on the Mount. These are three chapters (5-7) in Matthew. They are a summary of the Gospel message. Today’s passage on the Beatitudes is a summary of the Sermon on the Mount. The Beatitudes are not laws. They are a summons into the mystery of Jesus. He is the one who is truly blessed. The Beatitudes are a revelation of the depth and breadth of the mystery of love in our broken world that is Jesus Chris...

Mt 4:12-23 Dear Friends, Today we have our first selection from the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus introduces two themes that will be the foundation of his message throughout the year: the kingdom and the call.It is helpful for us to remember the mentality of the people at the beginning of Jesus’s public life. For the Jews, at that time, Satan was in charge. His power for evil was seen in all of life: sickness, violence, injustice, poverty, division. Likewise, the oppressive Roman Empire was seen as an expression of this evil. Even the turbulence of nature was experi...

John 1:29-34 Dear Friends, St. Matthew is our guide as we walk with Jesus in the beginning of Ordinary Time of our liturgical year. I always look forward to a new journey that is the same but always deeper, always more inviting as we grow more in our personal maturity and in faith.Today, however, we start out with St. John, and not only St. John, but seemingly the same story we had last week about Jesus’ encounter with the Baptist. This has got to tell us that we need to dig deeper for the message from John’s version of the baptism to grasp how it connects to S...

Matthew 3:13-17 Dear Friends, St. Matthew begins the public life of Jesus with the Baptism of the Son of God. In spite of the Baptist’s reluctance to baptize, Jesus tells John to go along with this public ritual. God has a plan and the baptism fits into that divine scheme. God wants Jesus to share the human experience including the ritual of repentance that John was celebrating. By his desire to be baptized, Jesus was showing a desire to plunge into the human reality. This was a reality in the ongoing conflict of good and evil, sin and grace. Ultimately, the depth...